Wikimedia travel site Wikivoyage launching next week

Wikimedia Foundation, the host of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia, is launching next week a global online travel guide called Wikivoyage.

Described on the beta website as a free travel guide that can be edited by a world-wide community of contributors called Wikivoyagers, the new site is scheduled for an official opening on Jan 15.

The project, which was accepted by the Wikimedia community in August last year, was launched on Wikimedia servers in beta in November, according to the website.

Wikimedia said in a blog post in December that the Wikivoyage project to create a free world travel guide which anyone can edit, launched on its servers on Nov. 10, migrating text content and accounts from old servers run by the Wikivoyage Association, a nonprofit organization based in Germany which was the former host of Wikivoyage. The community is working on the review and transfer of media files, and the site remains in beta until this and other cleanup tasks are completed, it added.

The content of the multi-language site is owned by the Wikivoyage contributors, who each own the copyright to their own contributions, and agree to license them according to a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, one of the more liberal licenses from the nonprofit organization Creative Commons. The domain names wikivoyage.org, wikivoyage.net and wikivoyage.com, and the equipment the site runs on is owned and operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, according to a FAQ on the website.

The site uses MediaWiki, a free wiki software application developed by Wikimedia and others, which runs on projects Wikimedia hosts including Wikipedia. Some minor changes have been made to the software.

Wikivoyage wants its articles to have practical information about traveling. It has also requested users and businesses not to use its site as a tool for advertising and promotion.

John Ribeiro covers outsourcing and general technology breaking news from India for The IDG News Service. Follow John on Twitter at @Johnribeiro. John's e-mail address is john_ribeiro@idg.com

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